Central America

After presenting my dad's immigration story in class I decided to look into Guatemala and how many people immigrated to the United States and it took me awhile to find anything because the majority talks about Mexico and "central america" it doesn't go into details about countries individually, but luckily I came across this website that talks about Central America and its migration.

"Since 1990, the number of Central American immigrants in the United States has nearly tripled. This immigrant population grew faster than any other region-of-origin population from Latin America between 2000 and 2010. Central American immigrants' share of the total immigrant population in the United States has also grown steadily for the past five decades, from less than 1 percent in 1960 to almost 8 percent in 2011."

A fact that caught my attention was that in 2011 the top three countries of origin for Central American immigrants were El Salvador(41%), Guatemala(28%) and Honduras(16%). Also about half of all Central American immigrants reside in three states: California, Texas and Florida. From the looks of this fact my parent migrated to one of these states which goes to show that immigrants must have some interest in these three states for the half that decide to reside in one of them.



http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=938

Thoughts

After doing the ancestry project I have learned that it can be very difficult when it comes to finding information on your own family and that depending how many generations have been born in the United States or have immigrated to the United States the results on the amount of information can vary. This week I really enjoyed listening to other people's findings of their families because so many peers had such an abundant amount of information to share and it was great listening to all the stories. I'm glad we have a variety of backgrounds in our class because not one of us are the same and it has given us the opportunity to learn about other ethnic groups and not just our own.

Chapter 15 thoughts

As the semester continues, this class has taught me alot about immigrants that I didn't really know about. The most fascinating group from this chapter were the Cubans because I barely knew any history about them so this chapter open my eyes and informed about how Cubans lived once the immigrated to the United States. Now I have gain such knowledge on certain ethnic groups I wasn't too certain about in the past because it wasn't taught in my previous history classes.

Exclusions

Exclusions, exclusions, exclusions was the topic that got my attention in this week's reading. Over the years in my history classes we would always discuss exclusions but only to a certain extent and in the end I never got a full understanding of what took place because of the lack of details that was shared. When I was reading and came across Chinese exclusions and laws they made targeting them really interested me because I picked up an abundant amount of information. I did not know what the Chinese had to go through and after reading this week its extremely sad how they had exclusions acts for them because they were not welcomed when they emigrated. We have come along way since those days and change has definitely occurred with the course of time. So many immigrants had it really hard when they came to the United States and yet they continued to come, why did they still come if they were treated so harshly?

Learning Experience

After reading Chapter 7 I learned alot about the Italians and Armenians that I did not know previous to this. The whole chapter to me was quite intriguing to read because it was all new information for me so I read it with a bit more interest. Its crazy to think about what different ethnic groups go through when they immigrate from one place to another and how over time things change for them. I love to learn new things because I gain knowledge and get to discuss later with peers. I'm really enjoying this class because as we continue on reading the chapters i'm learning quite alot about ethnic groups and their migration and what they had to go through which is so interesting to me because it is history I never really knew about.

Thoughts

After the discussion we had in class about why immigrants go to certain states in the United States, I began to think about my own family and why did they decide to immigrate from Nicaragua and Guatemala to California. Its interesting to see why people decide to go and stay there for the rest of their lives. Both my parents have lived in California for over 20 years and I have never wondered why they chose this state until today's class. Now the next time I talk to my parents I will be sure to ask them and share their response with the rest of the class. If you were going to immigrate to another place where would you go and why? If it were me I have no idea where I would go, but wherever I decided to move I would make sure I knew why in case anyone wanted to ask me one day.

Benjamin Franklin

After reading, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind" I felt really offended by what Benjamin Franklin said in his last paragraph because in my opinion it was extremely racist how he pinpointed different races and felt that the only race that should increase in number were what he called "Saxons". No one has the right to feel superior of another person and for him to believe that only one race is allowed into the world is very ignorant of him.